We are all engineers :) What equipment do you use? I apologize in advance if there is another place we are supposed to have this conversation :) Feel free to email me through here if you would rather.
Cheers!

Equipment: a couple of cheap guitars, a couple of cheap mics, an ancient version of Sonar Home Studio, a couple of soft synths and a bunch of signal processing packages by iZotope.

When I first heard this track I got the urge to remix it, because I thought it might be interesting to explore what could be done with EQ, reverb, panning and so on. I had a go and quickly posted the result as “drylandoftears”. But I just listened to this original version again and, well, now I think this is perfect as it is!

Every other time I listen to a mix, almost any mix, I want to change everything or leave it as is :-) In my education the only two helpful ‘evaluative’ methods I have found are having the original/untouched mix handy for a quick comparison (going back and forth between the two) and listening to both mixes for their emotional content. If the original mix sounds better or more purely emotive I keep playing. I guess I try to reserve judgement for the end of the process as well :-) as the great Bruce Mau says… Love your experiments as they were an ugly child :-) Anyway, keep doing what you are doing cause it really really works! Any thoughts of putting a Sappho album out?

Hi and thanks for this. A Sappho album is a neat idea. Only thing is that not much of her work survives—it’s mainly just fragments. That said, I guess you only need a few enigmatic lines to make a song, with instrumentation doing the rest. Anyway, I’ll have a look and see if I can find more stuff by Sappho. If enough material can be found, maybe a project could evolve. Maybe Jeris would be interested too?

Been thinking a bit more about this. Here’s what I got:

Sappho Album: possible?

I like the idea of an album inspired by Ancient Greek poetess Sappho (pronounced Sap-fo), who lived around 600 BC. She was famous in her time, and has since become associated with lesbianism, due to her love poems dedicated to female friends. Few full poems survive and what we mostly have are fragments. The key thing, however, is that Sappho deals with love, envy, jealousy, loss, passion, in a way that is totally relevant today and applicable to everyone.

Creating a Sappho album poses some problems—or rather decisions that must be reached early on. Assuming the lyrics are to be in English (as opposed to Greek) then we need a translation. Modern translations are probably a no-go due to copyright (unless some translator or academic wants to get involved). Older, out of copyright translations tend to use archaic, flowery language (lots of “thee”, “thou”, “thine” etc.) that may alienate modern listeners. And then there’s the fragmentary nature of many of the poems. And then there’s the fact that some poems contain lots of Ancient Greek cultural references that would be lost on a modern audience. Having said all that, Sappho in French or Italian or Native American might sound cool!

But I wonder if these difficulties can be overcome? One approach might be to create songs inspired by Sappho, rather than literal translations. In other words, take a Sappho poem as a starting point and adapt the words. Another approach might be a more “ambient” kind of album, with fragments of Sappho’s poetry feeding into a musical groove. A kind of semi-mystical, muse-like, Ancient-inspired, thing. A potentially fascinating aspect of a Sappho album is seeing how different artists, working in different genres, interpret the source material. An eclectic musical compilation is one way to go; or an album could be heavily focused on a sinlge genre—the options are there.

Well, I guess the ideas are there to be explored. But it’s a “concept album” waiting to happen, and one that might get picked up on by critics and the media. One thing to bear in mind though: Sappho is a unique voice in literature—any treatment of her work must be respectful.

Can Sappho save the world? A big part of me thinks she might.

I don’t think there is a higher compliment than capturing the ‘cinematic’ in an audio track :-) Thank you for the very kind words!
Cheers!

This site is just too fun to play with :-) Thanks :-)

There seems to be a lot of smooveness going around :-) I think it may be an epidemic! Cheers!